stringer
Americannoun
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a person or thing that strings.
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a long horizontal timber connecting upright posts.
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Architecture. string.
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Civil Engineering. a longitudinal bridge girder for supporting part of a deck or railroad track between bents or piers.
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a longitudinal reinforcement in the fuselage or wing of an airplane.
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Also called string correspondent. Journalism. a part-time newspaper correspondent covering a local area for a paper published elsewhere.
The Los Angeles paper has a correspondent in San Francisco but only a stringer in Seattle.
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a stout string, rope, etc., strung through the gills and mouth of newly caught fish, so that they may be carried or put back in the water to keep them alive or fresh.
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a contestant, player, or other person ranked according to skill or accomplishment (used in combination).
Most of the conductors at the opera house were third-stringers.
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Mining. a small vein or seam of ore, coal, etc.
noun
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architect
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a long horizontal beam that is used for structural purposes
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another name for stringboard
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nautical a longitudinal structural brace for strengthening the hull of a vessel
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a journalist retained by a newspaper or news service on a part-time basis to cover a particular town or area
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of stringer
late Middle English word dating back to 1375–1425; see origin at string, -er 1
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
She previously covered corporate governance and financial regulation as an intern reporter at Bloomberg Law and reported on crime as a metro stringer at the New York Times.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 30, 2026
The man in his 50s was discovered inside his white Toyota sedan in a parking structure along Century Boulevard near LAX, according to footage broadcast by RMG News, a stringer news service.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 28, 2026
Chandrakar used to also work as a "stringer" for news organisations, where his job involved providing outstation journalists with information about a story or sometimes, even chaperoning them through Maoist strongholds.
From BBC ● Jan. 8, 2025
She moved to Jerusalem in 1966, at age 20, and lived there through two wars and one peace treaty, working as a journalist for The Jerusalem Post and as a stringer for Time magazine.
From New York Times ● May 7, 2024
He pulled the largest fish off the stringer and held it in one hand with its white belly facing up.
From "Mississippi Trial, 1955" by Chris Crowe
RFA laid off its stringers in Myanmar a day before a devastating March earthquake.
From Barron's ● Oct. 29, 2025
The Associated Press also has local Palestinian stringers, and my review of its hundreds of stories on the war this year revealed a total of two deeply reported pieces on Hamas—neither datelined from Gaza.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 15, 2025
But the reason they have three shutouts in lopsided victories is that the second stringers are performing as well as first stringers when coach Jon Ellinghouse clears the bench.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 10, 2025
A handful of news organizations had maintained a regular presence with bureaus there, including The Associated Press, the BBC, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and Al-Jazeera, with a network of stringers helping others.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 19, 2023
The Preacher pulled the biggest two bass and the biggest perch off the stringers and said, “This perch is ten years old, and these bass are one year old each. How many years is that?”
From "Elijah of Buxton" by Christopher Paul Curtis
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.